An economic interpretation of the Gospel

By Phil Lawler ( bio - articles - email ) | Apr 10, 2025

In his teaching, relayed to us through the Gospel, Jesus uses images that would have been especially familiar to the people living in the Holy Land at that time; He speaks of fish and vineyards and sheep, to listeners who were fishermen and vintners and shepherds. But he also uses the language of economic transactions—of calculating costs and making investments and recognizing the value of pearls—that speak to people of any time or place.

In a new book, Michael Pakaluk—a philosophy professor now teaching at the Busch School of Business at Catholic University—offers an economic interpretation of the Gospel of St. Matthew, accompanied by his own new translation. In previous books he has given the same treatment to the gospels of St. Mark and St. John, each time finding one key to a new interpretation of the text (the influence of St. Peter in Mark, of the Virgin Mary in John). Now he looks at St. Matthew’s account, and finds therein the distinct approach of a man familiar with trade and commerce and the shrewd appraisal of value: a tax collector.

Because of his background St. Matthew would have been especially struck by the Lord’s references to commercial affairs. Pakaluk notes that at many points in his retelling of Christ’s preaching, Matthew recounts incidents or images that do not appear in the other gospels. And that only make sense, he remarks, because the “ambitious tax collector—if he was familiar with Roman best practices of accounting, banking, and contracts—would be well placed to see the power of these economic analogies.”

So St. Matthew—and he alone—quotes Christ’s denunciation of the Pharisees: “Because you pay tithes on mint and dill and cumin, and you have neglected the weightier things of the law: good judgment and mercy and faith.” There, Pakaluk observes: “Matthew sees clearly that Jesus is talking about the proper assessment of value.” In the parable of the lord of the vineyard, Pakaluk sees an appreciation for the role of agents and the delegation of authority: “Our Lord’s bias, as it were, toward the use of intermediaries who are strictly speaking not necessary.” After the Crucifixion, when Joseph of Arimathea seeks official permission to take the Lord’s body, we can see “Matthew’s distinctive interest in matters of confirmation, assurance, and chain of custody.”

These details of commercial activity are secondary, however, to a far more important message. Jesus is calling his listeners’ attention to the spiritual economy, the divine economy, urging them to realize that salvation, the “pearl of great price,” is more valuable than any earthly treasure. A good banker, Pakaluk reminds us, recognizes real value, looking beyond instant gratification, preparing for the future. In that sense the message of this Gospel is that we should all be good bankers, measuring our profits and losses, our investments and returns, in terms of the spiritual economy. In the Kingdom that Christ opens before us, Pakaluk writes, “a new economy of forgiving and asking forgiveness in turn is established, once each person’s own vast debt is remitted by Christ through his Passion.”

Be Good Bankers goes still further, suggesting that the structure of St. Mathew’s Gospel reflects the simple form of accounting that was used at the time: a two-column listing of deposits and payments, receipts and obligations. The overarching story begins, of course, with mankind facing a debt it cannot repay, the cost of Adam’s sin. But Jesus pays that debt. In Pakaluk’s reading, the first half of St. Mathew’s account tells first how an immense (and undeserved) deposit of wealth is credited to the account of mankind through the Incarnation. Then in the second half, Jesus makes the costly payment and the account is cleared. And more than that; having made a “deposit” of divinity into human nature through his Incarnation, Jesus now pays for mankind the price of admission into divine life.

Be Good Bankers is persuasive in its insistence that St. Matthew, although he abandoned the business of collecting taxes, never lost his keen appreciation for the world of commerce; he merely shifted his attention to investments that bring yields in the long—in fact eternal—term. Pakaluk’s overall interpretation of this gospel is deliberately provocative, and readers may find that he sometimes stretches a point. But his interpretation brings a new perspective to the Gospel, and for that we can be grateful.

The new translation, too, is a distinct contribution. Any new translation, provided that it hews closely to the original text, sheds new light on the Gospel, insofar as the particular choice of words reflects the translator’s own appreciation of the message. When accompanied by an explanation, the choice of words can be eye-opening. One example from Be Good Bankers should suffice to illustrate the point:

In his translation of the Lord’s Prayer, Pakaluk renders one familiar line in an unfamiliar way; Mt 6:11 becomes: “Give us this day our substance-covering bread.” The translator tells us that the original Greek word here, epiousios, also used in St. Luke’s account, is “found nowhere else among all extant Greek texts.” The term commonly translated as “daily” is literally something closer to the awkward formulation “upon substance”—where “substance” refers to an ultimate reality. Earlier translations used the term “superstantial,” which seems closer to the original, but still difficult to understand. Using Pakaluk’s interpretative key we might conclude that the “substance” invoked here is not the sort of bread we eat every day, but the Bread of eternal life, the ultimate store of value in the divine economy.